door closed; he was alone with the thinnest cop with the sweatiest shirt of faded blue, and a red-and-gold hammer-and-sickle badge on his lapel. He had a conspicuous shoulder holster. The policeman’s face was thin, everything about him was thin, the nylon on his clothes, the plastic of his shoes, he was thin and angry and fifty and sweating hatred for everything Jake represented: money, the West, youth, privelige, the English language – all the western kids puking on the steps of the temples of Vang Vieng, all of the westerners polluting beautiful ancient Laos. Jake almost wanted to say Sorry.
He said, ‘Sorry?’
The man shook his head angrily, and spat out a question; but he spoke barely any English. He stood and he shouted at Jake, incomprehensibly. What was he shouting? It was all said in Lao. They were alone. Jake tried not to cower in his chair. He got the sense the policeman was a millimetre away from whipping out his gun and slapping it across Jake’s face, breaking his nose like balsa, squirting blood onto the desk. Was that already a blood stain? On the wall?
Jake stayed mute. Staring ahead. Meek and polite – and mute. That’s what he had always been advised. Say nothing. But this was nasty. Jake had heard vague stories of western journalists being flung in jail in Laos, for going where they were not wanted: flung in jail and tortured, by a prickly, defensive, wary communist regime, a cornered country, now surrounded by capitalists. He’d seen men on the terrace of the FCC in Phnom Penh with limps and bruises and lucky-to-be-alive expressions: I just got back from Luang, where the beer is good and the girls are cute, but man oh man . . .
The door swung open. Chemda stepped through, followed by the policeman who spoke English. The policeman looked half-satisfied. The questions were over? Chemda lifted her cellphone and explained:
‘I got hold of people in Phnom Penh! They confirmed it all . . . our presence in the Plain of Jars. We’re OK, Jake, we’re OK.’
It was true. The mood had altered. Significantly. It hadn’t entirely improved. But it had changed. Apparently some temporary satisfaction had been achieved. The thin officer sat back, and stared angrily but quietly through the grubby window. Chairs were set back. Hands were cursorily shaken.
The English-speaking officer escorted them from his office. As he did he told them they were free to go, but only free to leave the police station. He wanted them to remain within Ponsavanh itself, until his initial investigations were concluded.
At the door to the street the English-speaking policeman rewarded them with a terse and sinister grin. ‘So. I think your bus tour is over. This is a murder case. I believe you do well to remember this. Laos is not Cambodia. Sabaydee.’
After six hours of questioning, they walked down the police station steps, into the dusty whirl of Ponsavanh.
Muddy pick up trucks were ferrying sandalled farm workers down the main street. Girls with inclined eyes, wearing brightly coloured jerkins adorned with silver coins on chains, were smiling at shops full of Chinese snacks and tiny bananas; ‘I need a coffee,’ said Jake, ‘Jesus Christ. How much do I need a coffee’.
Chemda nodded. ‘There is a cafe down here, in the market.’ They crossed the whirling main street; the shattered concrete of the roads and pavements led to a carless square – full of people. And tables. And chattering traders. And flies.
Many of the tables and counters were shaded from the sunshine by battered roofs of zinc; the tables were laid out with local food and game: dead wildcats, owls, strangled stoats, and small jungle dogs, their teeth wild and snarling even in death; there were bottles of yellow-and-black hornets pickled in vinegar, stinking riverfish on counters of blood-tinged ice, and piles of slaughtered field rats. Jake was used to the extraordinary fecundity and exoticism of Southeast Asian eating habits; he had never seen piles of rats before.
Chemda sat down at the rickety market cafe table, and glanced at Jake, as he gazed across the market aisle at the heaped-up piles of brown rats.
‘Field rats,’ she said. Her voice was thick with exhaustion. ‘They are famous here. I mean, as far as rats go, these are top notch. You can’t get a better rat in Laos.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Jake, smiling at her brave if tired attempt at humour. But the blood in the muzzles of the slaughtered rats reminded him of the blood on the floor, the blood of the dead Cambodian still in the tread of his boots. Ghastly.
‘What just happened? Did Tou really kill him? I don’t get it.’
She stared down at the grain of her elegantly narrow indigo jeans, now dusty and smudged. She shook her head, and hid her eyes with a poetic gesture, like the cultured shyness of an Angkor princess.
At last she dropped her hand, and spoke.
‘Can we sit in the sun?’
They shifted down the pewlike benches of the cafe into the light; the sun, Jake noticed, was actually strong, sharpened by upland cold – but strong. Healing. Warming. They both turned their tired faces to the heat and said nothing for a second, absorbing.
Then she said:
‘It can’t be Tou. It just can’t. He was, ah, part of the team.’
‘But he’s run away.’
Chemda shrugged. She had taken off her grey and tailored leather jacket, he noticed the slenderness of her topaz brown shoulders.
‘He’s scared. He is Hmong.’
‘OK . . .’
‘And he has contacts with other Hmong of course, which is why we employed him. The Hmong have been helping us. Because this is Hmong country: they know the Plain better than anyone. They farm the rice paddies, they slash and burn the forests. They also know which areas are, ah, too risky, too saturated with unexploded ordnance. Of course that is – that was – pretty important for our work.’
‘He rang you last night – trying to get through. But why . . .’ Jake was trying to puzzle it out. Something was jarring, incongruent. A shard of memory like a piece of grit in a shoe. Chemda interrupted his thoughts:
‘They really don’t want us here Jake. As I said. And a murder case gives them a great excuse to make things extremely uncomfortable. It took the UN ages to get permission for this investigation in the first place. Now they have the whip hand. You noticed they didn’t take our passports? It’s because they want us to quit, to go. To give up and fly home. That was his hint about Laos – you heard it? “This is not Cambodia”. Ahh.’ Her sigh was brief. And unsentimental. And somehow undefeated.
Jake sat back. Their coffees had arrived, two chipped little cups of thick blackness, plus a tin of condensed sweetened milk already pierced and bubbling. Jake dribbled the viscous milk in his coffee; Chemda wanted hers black.
They drank, quietly.
A man across the market was holding a chunk of honeycomb. It looked like a thick slice of intensely rotted wood. The man was digging into each cell of the hive-slice with a finger, and retrieving a wriggling blob of whiteness. A larva. The man popped the white living larva in his mouth, munching and smiling, chasing it with slugs of Doctor Pepper from a can. Then he winkled out another, and ate it.
Something slotted in Jake’s mind. He looked at Chemda, and said:
‘You
